Rules: standing automations
Say a sentence once and it keeps happening: tag, file, task, pin, stand frames, write reports.
Make one
Tell Hedwig the rule in a sentence. It compiles it once, shows a dry run over your recent mail — what it would have matched, what it would have pulled out — and you confirm.
“whenever an email from Sarah is about the lease, tag it Lease”
“when an invoice arrives, add a row to the Invoices sheet with the amount and due date”
“every weekday at 8, write a short brief of what came in overnight”
“when I open my Investor week standup, stand the fundraising frames”
What can trigger a rule
New mail (including your sent mail), a document, a task, a calendar event, a page opened in a browser frame, a file dropped on the board, a standup opening, the board opening, or a time of day (daily, or chosen weekdays — it fires on the first open after the time). Board triggers can carry a count condition: “if more than twenty unread…”.
The check
A rule’s check has two halves. The hard half is decided from the row itself — sender, domain, subject, folder, tag, reply state, first-time sender, has an invite — and is free forever. The judgment half is one yes/no question that needs reading, and extract pulls typed values (an amount, a date, a list) to use in the actions. Rules that would read everything are refused with an estimate of the cost.
What a rule can do
Assign a tag, edit Gmail labels, add rows to a datasheet (the email rides along as a link chip), create a task, pin the mail as a frame, stand or move or rename frames, write to a document, drop a sticky, or run an agent and leave a report frame — one step per item, never a frame per item.
The rules panel
The rules icon in the rail wears one indicator: a count while runs are in flight, a “!” for a failure you have not seen yet, a quiet dot otherwise. The panel shows Running (with Stop), your Rules (pause, edit, delete), and Receipts: Fired, Almost, Paused, Failed, Stopped, each with a reason, a thumbs-down, and Undo. Stopping a run takes back what it did, report and all.
Limits
Plans cap how many rules you keep and how many judgment reads a day they may spend; a lapsed plan keeps rules stored but silent.